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Discover the remarkable trajectory of Hamilton – the most nominated production in the 42-year history of the Olivier Awards

Good things come to those who wait, and no more so than for 38-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda. The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, he was brought up in Washington Heights at the north end of Manhattan island, a far distance from the Great White Way of Broadway, yet a stepping stone for Miranda – the genius behind the most successful musical on both sides of the Atlantic in decades, who not only wrote it but starred in the title role.

By Miranda’s own account, the soundtrack of his early home life in Hispanic Washington Heights anticipates the soundtrack to Hamilton – an effervescent culture clash of Broadway (which his parents loved), rap, 1990s hip-hop and Latin music.

He was educated at Hunter College on the Upper East Side, where he encountered Stephen Sondheim (to whom he would later send Hamilton drafts for feedback), before enrolling at Wesleyan University, a prominent arts college in Connecticut.

It was here that he began work on his first musical, In the Heights, which used Latin music and hip-hop to tell a story about the neighbourhood he grew up in. It premiered at Wesleyan in 2000, and eventually came to Broadway for a three-year run from 2008, winning four Tony Awards and a Grammy.

That same year, Miranda first started working on the idea of a musical about Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, and the fellow on the US$10 note. (Before Hamilton’s huge success, he was due to be replaced by a woman.) The impetus? Picking up Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton at an airport as a holiday read. Out of such chance encounters, great art is born.

As for the historical Hamilton, he was born illegitimate in the West Indies and orphaned in his early years, shipping up as a teenager in New York and joining America’s Revolutionary War before becoming one of the new nation’s Founding Fathers. A sex scandal later derailed his career and a duel in 1804 brought about his untimely death.

Miranda saw Hamilton as a Tupac Shakur figure

Miranda saw Hamilton as a Tupac Shakur figure and, following that train of thought, conceived the idea of a concept album fusing American history and hip-hop. On the evening of 12 May, 2009, Miranda performed the Hamilton Mixtape before President Obama at a poetry jam evening at the White House. Six years later, Obama admitted backstage to TV host Jon Stewart, “I feel like I should get one of those Tonys because the show started at the White House.”

In between times, Miranda wrote jingles for political ads – an education in itself – and performed with hip-hop improv group Freestyle Love Supreme, all the time working away on Hamilton songs. It was a slow process. The likes of Alexander Hamilton – the song he performed at that White House event – had taken him a year to write, while the couplets for My Shot took another 12 months.

“Every couplet needed to be the best couplet I ever wrote,” Miranda told 60 Minutes. “That’s how seriously I was taking it.” His method was seriously old-school, too – write at the piano, loop it, burn it, walk around town with it on his headphones until he had the lyrics down.

Historical significance: Hamilton tells the story of one of America's Founding FathersCredit:
Matthew Murphy

At the same time, there was copious research: combing through Hamilton’s correspondence, reading up on Hamilton’s nemesis Aaron Burr, and learning the rules of the duel the two men fought. As things got going, Ron Chernow came in as historical consultant, and Miranda would send demos to his high-school mentor, Stephen Sondheim. “This raised obvious red flags,” Sondheim told the New York Times. “I worried that an evening of rap might get monotonous; I thought the rhythm might become relentless.”

In 2012, with the Hamilton Mixtape now comprising a dozen numbers, Miranda took it to the Lincoln Center in New York, before workshopping it as a musical at New York’s Public Theater in spring 2014. The show opened to the public at the beginning of 2015, transferring to Broadway that summer. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since arriving in the UK, Hamilton has continued its extraordinary run of sold-out houses, rave reviews and rapt audiences hanging off every word.

And the story’s not over yet – while the London production has garnered its record-breaking 13 Olivier Award nominations, Miranda is busy releasing a track every month through 2018 as part of Hamildrops, featuring new and unused songs from the musical. Oh, and the cast album, Hamilton: An American Musical has sold a million and a half copies to date. Miranda’s – and Hamilton’s – remarkable story looks set to run and run.

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